Aftermath
by knockplease
Summary: The quiet little virus would only spare a precious few survivors... if you could even call them that. They were lucky to have survived this long. That depended, of course, on how one interpreted the word "lucky".


Disclaimer: If I were Jhonen Vasquez, this would not be an RAPR fic. It's an RAPR fic. Therefore, I am not Jhonen Vasquez. It follows, then, that** I do not own Invader Zim**.

Enjoy.

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**Aftermath**

**Prologue:**  
**The Way the World Ends **

Somewhere, someone in the universe sneezed.

This particular individual was of no significance at all. He was a used spaceship dealer and his wife was a stay-at-home mother to their young son and infant daughter. It was as close to the ideal of the "white picket fence" as anyone could get.

Four days after that sneeze, that proverbial picket fence would be torn to splinters and covered in blood, both literally and figuratively.

Though he didn't know it (and the poor bastard never _would_), that sneeze gave birth to the most devastating infection the universe had ever seen. It would spread across galaxies, showing no preference to race or gender. The quiet little virus that had unintentionally made a bad copy of itself when attaching to some unlucky immune cell would only spare a precious few survivors... if you could even call them that. "Survivor", in this instance, meant "died of causes _other _than Infection". _Anything_ other than Infection.

"Infection" with a capital "I". No one lived long enough to discover a scientific name, though it came to be called "Kalma" in the vernacular, after the first victim. The tiny infant exposed to the sneeze that signaled the end of the world. She'd been completely infected for a full two days before anyone noticed. When she'd bitten her brother hard enough to draw blood, her mother had just assumed she was tired or hungry. Her husband would exhibit the same sort of listless, dazed behavior later that evening before chasing her out of the house, slamming her body into their perfect white fence until the brute force broke through it and she hit the ground on the other side. The son had called the police, but by the time they arrived, his mother had been long dead and his father was gnawing at the flesh of the arm he'd brutally ripped from her body.

He'd lunged at them, spraying infected blood into the eyes of two officers. He would bite another of them. Of the two left, one had tried to lift Kalma from her crib, and her barely-there baby teeth tore through his long-sleeved shirt and sunk deep into skin. The boy would show the officers his wound, explaining that she had been acting weird since the day before. The boy would be rushed to a hospital, and after a week, that hospital would be under quarantine.

There were no initial symptoms. The incubation period would vary from species to species, but the end result would always remain constant. A creature whose kind would ironically never come into contact with the infection had found the perfect words to explain it.

_This is the way the world ends  
This is the way the world ends  
This is the way the world ends  
Not with a bang, but a whimper_

Zim had found the text so amusing, he'd sent a copy to his leaders. At the time, both of them had laughed so hard that they actually called Zim _intentionally_, to thank him. Every time they'd demolish a planet, they'd snicker and jokingly ask each other if he heard a whimper. _"No. There was a pretty loud BANG, though"_ followed by laughter. In the days that led up to automatic quarantine of Irk, those words seemed to float to the surface of Purple's thoughts. He and Red had been prepared to leave the planet when an unexpected run-in with a group of Infected forced them to miss the deadline.

Auto-Quarantine was programmed to last one hundred years.

They had tried to access the override, but the number of Infected had grown exponentially and forced them underground before they could get close to the necessary building. Red had literally _dragged_ Purple, kicking and sobbing, into the under-city.

He'd cried and begged for _hours_ while Red forced him onward. He'd tried to pull away and Red sighed before calmly hoisting his partner over his shoulder and continued forward. Purple had thrashed until exhausted, intentionally trying to make the experience as unpleasant as possible for his partner. Red had remained stoic and silent, aside from the occasional grunt when shifting his grip on Purple. The violet-eyed Irken had given up and gone limp eventually.

Nothing was said until the artificial sunlight had begun to dim. Purple had felt his partner's steps growing slower and more fatigued, his grip loosening and weary and he thought of how absolutely exhausted Red must have looked by then. Guilty tears he didn't notice had begun to fall and he whispered idly to himself,

_"_This_ is the way the world ends."_

Red had sighed in a barely audible voice, _"This is the way the world ends."_

Purple remembered how he'd choked back tears, experiencing a kind of agony he'd never felt before but would become familiar. He felt his insides twist and whimpered in an effort to fight his tears.

Red stopped walking and eased Purple to his feet. The red-eyed Irken cradled one side of his partner's face with his hand and inhaled a hard, hissing breath.

_"A-are you... Red, oh God - are you crying?"_

He said nothing, squeezing his eyes shut and clenching his jaw as his chest heaved with every short, shallow breath.

_

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**Allusions & References**

**Kalma** is the Finnish goddess of death and decay. Her name means "the stench of corpses"

If you live in a cave, and _don't _know that **"This is the way the world ends... not with a bang, but a whimper" **is from T.S. Elliot's poem, _"The Hollow Men"_, you should. Go read it.

**Notes**

I was writing my _Non Sequitur_ drabbles, and really enjoyed "Lucky". I spent too much time working out how the infection started and progressed, etc, and I really felt like I could do something more with it. It's a great standalone, but I was always itching to elaborate. Plus, I have an affection for the Zombie Apocalypse. After some encouragement from **The Magic Pocket Turtle**'s review, I decided to go for it. My Turtle-Friend, this one's for you :)


End file.
